Downloading attribute / structural data

[Anurag Laddha]

Greetings,

Using Performance reports as listed in https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/reports the only way to download attribute data for Adwords entites (Account, Campaign, Adgroup etc)? In other words to get attribute/structural data is specifying the performance reports of your choice (say CAMPAIGN_PERFORMANCE_REPORT) and fields of behavior 'Attribute' (say ExternalCustomerId,CampaignId,CampaignName,Amount,Status) the right way to go about it?

When we download only attribute values through performance reports, are the attribute values always what they are at the time of download or we can request for attribute values back in time?

How can we know through API the time at which the attribute value (eg Amount, Status) changed for some entity (eg Campaign)?

Thanks!

Anurag

[Josh Radcliff (AdWords API Team)]

Hi,

To get attribute information you can either use the object-specific services such as CampaignService, AdGroupService, etc., or use reports. Reporting is often preferable for the reasons outlined in our Structure Reports guide.

Fields labeled as Attribute always show the current value of the field -- please see the descriptions of the columns after the list of reports on our Report Types page.

To determine when attributes of an account have changed, you can use the CustomerSyncService. This will give you the IDs of changed objects for a given time frame, but not the changed values. If you need the history of values on your objects, you will have to utilize the CustomerSyncService in conjunction with the other services and store the history of values in a database on your side.

Cheers,

Josh, AdWords API Team

[Anurag Laddha]

Thanks Josh.

Sorry for the late reply.

Anurag

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[Moe]

Hi Josh,

I want to directly retrieve cost for a certain campaign using AWQL on the campaign service and output it in my program. Is that possible?

Or am I supposed to download an AdHoc report in csv format, then parse it to retrieve the cost value?!

Thanks!

[Josh Radcliff (AdWords API Team)]

Hi,

You do not have to take the intermediate step of writing the output to a file. You can simply read and parse the input stream directly. For example, if you were using the Java client library, you could read and parse response.getInputStream(). You can take a similar approach with each of the libraries.

Cheers,

Josh, AdWords API Team